A story that claims a woman, Gemma Sheridan, was found via Google Earth after she was on a deserted island for seven years is fake. (News-Hound.org screenshot)

A story that claims a woman was found via Google Earth after she was on a deserted island for seven years is fake.

The story was published on News-Hound.org, which frequently publishes false news articles–including a long-running hoax article about a Jan. 4 planetary alignment that will reduce Earth’s gravity for five minutes.

No mainstream or local news outlets published the Google Earth story about Gemma Sheridan, who was allegedly lost in a storm in 2007 and spent the past seven years on a deserted island.

“Fast forward a couple more years,” the fake article reads. “I woke up 1 morning to the sound of a plane flying over me which was unusually low, I could not believe it, I thought it was a dream. I ran to the beach screaming and waving my arms like a lunatic, the plane flew over 2 or 3 more times and then dropped a small package.”

It continues: “Inside was a radio, fresh water, food and a small medical kit. I switched on the radio and heard the first human voice for years. We talked for what seemed like an eternity, then I asked the voice on the other end ‘How did you find me’ to which they replied ‘Some kid from Minnesota found your SOS sign on Google Earth.’”

As hoax-debunking website WafflesAtNoon puts it, “The website which produced this story provided no sources, and there are no corroborating reports to be found anywhere online. News-Hound.org was only registered in January 2014 – although it has articles posted that pre-date its registration. The website has numerous outlandish stories, such as the claim that a man sued his wife for being too ugly or a mermaid which washed ashore after a hurricane.”

Hoax-debunking site Snopes added more insight: “First of all, the NewsHound web site is not a news site at all, and it has, in place of news, reproduced a number of other hoaxes and spoofs as if they were real news, such as long-debunked stories about a Chinese man suing his wife over giving birth to an ugly baby, Apple paying Microsoft [sic] a $1 billion debt all in nickels, and a planetary alignment causing gravity on Earth to be negated for five minutes.”

“Additionally, portions of text from the Newshound story were lifted directly from a 2013 Daily Mail article about Ed Stafford, an Amazon explorer who survived by himself for 60 days on a remote island in the Pacific after volunteering to do so for a television documentary,” Snopes says.